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Saturday, November 7, 2009. New Comics were 3 days ago

 

Gender and Reading Habits Part Two: Let's Hear it for the Girls

By Kristy Valenti

Tuesday April 1, 2008 10:00:00 am

*See disclaimers last column. This one was a bit harder to write, because there's just not that much hard data available on women and comics.

Scholastic Books' Graphix imprint made a canny move when they announced that Raina Telgemeier was adapting Ann M. Martin's long-running series of books, The Baby-Sitters Club, into graphic novels. Not only were they targeting the intended audience of 9-to12-year-old girls, but, crucially, the series also has appeal for their mothers, who had grown up on the books, and to whom they could directly market, thanks to Scholastic's strong presence in elementary schools via book fairs and catalogs.[1] (To be fair, they were more generally aiming for the broader market of women in their 20s who were nostalgic for the BSC.) The graphic-novel series appears to be successful: according to Publishers Weekly, Telgemeier's original contract was for two books, and she's currently working on a fourth.[2]

My guess is that blogger Heidi Meeley would approve of Scholastic's tactics. About a year ago here, she made an argument that comic shops should target women, using these numbers as support: "According to Entrepreneur magazine [bolding hers], 'Nine out of 10 women self-identify as the primary shoppers in their household". Also, "Women make (or strongly influence) the purchase of more than half of all consumer electronics, 75 percent of over-the-counter drugs, and 80 to 85 percent of all consumer goods." Anecdotally speaking, I've seen this to be true: when I worked in a big-chain bookstore, I saw many women picking up reading material not only for themselves, but for their entire households and as gifts.

Additionally, women read more, maintained USA Today while discussing a 2007 poll: "the median figure — with half reading more, half fewer — was nine books for women and five for men [per year]. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger. […] More women than men read every major category of books except for history and biography. Industry experts said that confirms their observation that men tend to prefer non-fiction." (It doesn't look like graphic novels were included as a category in that poll.)[3]

Apparently, girls don't stop reading at a certain age in the same way that boys are said to do: empirically, many of the girls I spoke to at a 2005 manga-and-anime con said they loved to read already, and were supplementing their regular reading with manga[4]. So if women buy more stuff and read more,[5] why aren't they buying more comics than men? To consider this, one thing we have to do is separate the purchase of single issues from the purchase of graphic novels / manga tankouban.[6]






In regards to single issues, I think it's because the biggest difference between girls' and boys' (and men's and women's) comics-reading habits is that men are socialized to treat comics as collectibles, and women are not. I've observed this to be the case even outside of the Direct Market: in 2002, I saw a boy of about 7 given Transformers Generation #1 as a gift. (At the time, my comic shop had so many copies they were literally falling off the shelf.) Before the boy had a chance to open it, his non-comic-book-reading father told him, "You're going to have to be careful with that. It's going to be worth money some day." I've seen this work the other way around too: if the comic is not collectible, some people don't recognize it as a comic. At that 2005 manga-and-anime convention, I spent a lot of time chatting with the moms of the kids. I asked one lady if she had read comics and she said, "are Archies comics?"[7]

This is definitely a generational thing, and the times they are a-changin', but I do see this comics-are-collectibles culture still in effect in many men (especially those who were exposed to the '90s boom). As such, they're less likely to lend out their single-issue comics: they know that they're to be stored in a longbox and to appreciate in value.[8] In response to Meeley's post, I wrote "I help out with advertising at the office, and one of the things we push at advertisers is not how many issues sell, necessarily, but how many people actually read a copy.[9] From what I've found, it turns out that women are more likely to share their comics and books than men. It's not too difficult to imagine a scenario where women buy less comics than men, but are reading a lot more comics than they buy."[10] Meeley responded that that matched her observations.







As the industry trends toward thicker, bookstore-and-library-friendly repackaging of comics and manga, I think that the generational impact will be enormous: right now, for women, to borrow some words from Jason Barker on the TCJ message board, "a graphic novel is seen as no more an investment than a DVD," (and, like a DVD, can just as easily be taken out of the library, borrowed, Netflixed,[11] found in a bargain bin, bought used, etc.) and that as this current group of boys grow up, it will soon be the same for them.[12]

In my discussion with YA librarian Jennifer Bisson (see her disclaimer last column), she said that that the teen manga / graphic novel section has a wide variety of readers, from "9 to 50." (Which makes it one of the rare categories in which people "read down" — that is, read material suitable for people younger than themselves. Usually people "read up," like 14-year-old girls who read Stephen King.) She continued,

superhero comics are dominated by men, but manga is 50/50 and has a fair share of women in their 20s and 30s... I might also add that not only is it rare that the collection is used by such a wide age range but that it is also one of the most heavily used collections. For the small size of the collection, say compared to all our adult fiction or picture books, each volume circulates an enormous amount... More females than males use the library generally, but physically speaking, males read more than they check out

(i.e., the standing-or-sitting-around-and-reading thing so popular in the aisles of stores such as Barnes and Noble).

In another response to Meeley's post, Lisa of Neptune Comics in Waukesha, Wis. commented: "Craig and I always worry when a guy comes in and says he's engaged or getting married, or sometimes when he's got a 'serious' girlfriend. We kind of nervously chuckle and say 'Oh No.' Because more often than not wives and serious girlfriends are the #1 reason why a guy stops buying comics."






I can see this being the case in terms of single issues (speaking in strictly economic terms, they're just not a good buy, you get more for your dollar with trades. And, sequestered the way they are in comic shops, it's not that point-of-sale reading material at the checkout lane that's so easy to justify tossing in with some gum).[13] In the graphic-novel sense, particularly in indy comics and manga, one narrative I've come across more than once is that of a young man (usually in college, or when they're of college age) who has stopped reading (usually superhero) comics (or was never very into them in the first place), when a lady friend (or girlfriend) will reintroduce (or introduce) them to the medium via a work like Ghost World. I don't want to imagine myself as the default case here, because that's a huge part of the problem in comics, but I will relate a somewhat relevant personal experience. When my significant other had burned through all of the starter graphic novels (Watchmen, etc.) that our guy friend had lent him, I had to introduce him to more alternative stuff that matched his tastes, like Black Hole. As female cartoonists such as Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi are becoming more high profile, graphic novels are being accepted in more schools, bookstores and libraries, girls are growing up to create their own comics and, in the U.S., a wider range of topics are being addressed in the medium,[14] I think more and more women are reading comics every day, and such scenarios are becoming more common.

I would like to thank Jennifer Bisson, Sean Rollosson, Jennifer Webster and my bookstore buddy for their assistance.

1. http://allagesreads.blogspot.com/2007/04/interview-david-saylor-of-scholastic.html
2. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6328712.html
3. Of course, the main drive of that article is that, depressingly, people are reading less and less books in general. The college-education angle is of interest, as well, as more women than men attend college now. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?
ex=1310097600&en=cd9efba2e9595dec&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
4. I've heard the theory floated around that girls prefer manga and that boys prefer anime, but I don't have statistics. The fact that manga is fairly friendly industry for women (after all, the richest woman in Japan, at one point, was the manga-ka Rumiko Takahashi) translates as well.
5. Apparently, women use the Internet more too. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004775
6. Tankouban is defined as a "Japanese manga graphic novel, usually pocket sized" by http://www.animetion.co.uk/glossary.htm
7. Also anecdotally speaking, women don't seem to have the same problems with reading the same books that their parents have read that men seem to do.
8. One Free Comic Book Day, I was checking out a new comics shop, and I decided to by a comic that my regular retailer was out of. I asked for a bag and a board, too, because I was going to stuff the comic in my backpack. As the friendly and helpful proprietor rang me up, he told me about a woman who bought lots of comics as his shop … but didn't bag and board them. His tone was one of disbelief.
9. This is called the "read-through rate."
10. Yes, I know it's lazy and bad journalism (columnism?) to quote myself from a year-old message-board post. Mea culpa.
11. There's already a Netflix-type service for anime and manga: http://mangatakeout.com/
12. This is also known as the mainstream-comics-and-comic-shops-are-doomed theory, as best articulated by comics critics such Alan David Doane and Dirk Deppey.
13. Pointing again to the women-make-the-majority-of-family purchases statistics, all of the reading material at the checkout lane at the supermarket is pretty much aimed at women and kids.
14. She isn't hooked for life or anything, but I did manage to get a non-comic-book-reading lady friend to read and enjoy La Perdida because she was embarking on a trip to Mexico.

Previous article: Gender and reading habits, part one
Next article: Sakura Con

Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008

 

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